Abstract
An incursion of an important exotic transboundary animal disease requires a prompt and intensive response. The routine analysis of up-to-date data, as near to real time as possible, is essential for the objective assessment of the patterns of disease spread or effectiveness of control measures and the formulation of alternative control strategies. In this paper, we describe the Standard Analysis of Disease Investigation (SADI), a toolbox for informing disease outbreak response, which was developed as part of New Zealand's biosecurity preparedness. SADI was generically designed on a web-based software platform, Integrated Real-time Information System (IRIS). We demonstrated the use of SADI for a hypothetical foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak scenario in New Zealand. The data standards were set within SADI, accommodating a single relational database that integrated the national livestock population data, outbreak data, and tracing data. We collected a well-researched, standardised set of 16 epidemiologically relevant analyses for informing the FMD outbreak response, including farm response timelines, interactive outbreak/network maps, stratified epidemic curves, estimated dissemination rates, estimated reproduction numbers, and areal attack rates. The analyses were programmed within SADI to automate the process to generate the reports at a regular interval (daily) using the most up-to-date data. Having SADI prepared in advance and the process streamlined for data collection, analysis and reporting would free a wider group of epidemiologists during an actual disease outbreak from solving data inconsistency among response teams, daily “number crunching,” or providing largely retrospective analyses. Instead, the focus could be directed into enhancing data collection strategies, improving data quality, understanding the limitations of the data available, interpreting the set of analyses, and communicating their meaning with response teams, decision makers and public in the context of the epidemic.
Highlights
Concurrent with globalisation and cross-border movements, the opportunity for the emergence of new infectious pathogens in a country has increased substantially [1, 2]
When trying to follow the course of an epidemic and judge the effects of control measures, the routine analysis of up-todate data, as near to real time as possible, is essential to allow objective assessment of the patterns of disease spread, assessment of the effectiveness of control measures, and the formulation of alternative control strategies [4]. This process is rarely formally documented in the published literature, but examples can be found in the United Kingdom’s response to bovine spongiform encephalopathy from 1986 to 2012 [5] and the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) that occurred in 2001 [6, 7]
Standard Analysis of Disease Investigation (SADI) was developed as a customised project within an application, Integrated Real-time Information System (IRIS)1 (EpiSoft Ltd, New Zealand)
Summary
Concurrent with globalisation and cross-border movements, the opportunity for the emergence of new infectious pathogens in a country has increased substantially [1, 2]. When trying to follow the course of an epidemic and judge the effects of control measures, the routine analysis of up-todate data, as near to real time as possible, is essential to allow objective assessment of the patterns of disease spread, assessment of the effectiveness of control measures, and the formulation of alternative control strategies [4] This (often iterative) process is rarely formally documented in the published literature, but examples can be found in the United Kingdom’s response to bovine spongiform encephalopathy from 1986 to 2012 [5] and the outbreak of FMD that occurred in 2001 [6, 7]
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